Workplace Gallery is delighted to announce Third Uncle the first solo exhibition of Swedish artist Jacob Dahlgren at Workplace London.

Third Uncle brings together a series of new abstract paintings made using live electrical cable set into a pristine surface of layered acrylic paint. Oscillating between painting and installation, form and function Dahlgren's plug-in works are connected together alongside lamps, TV monitors, and other everyday electrical items creating a circuit throughout the entire gallery.

Dahlgren's work is concerned with a dialogue between the authoritative singularity of pure formal abstraction and its position within a variable, complex and social shared culture. His repetitious collections of ubiquitous and ordinary objects, often domestic, industrially manufactured (and frequently, knowingly Scandinavian); stand in their gestalt form as proxy for High Modernist Abstract Painting and for all of the ideological territory that Twentieth Century Art Theory has staked out for it. The contributing objects, however, signify a collective and human aspect of society, each representing an individual choice, used in a unique way by its consumer. Together these objects stand for the group or community, and as such they become democratic rather than authored. Through endless ingenious amalgams of pattern, abstraction and mass-produced objects, Dahlgren's recent works purposefully inhabit modes of modernist painting, deliberately playing with the inherent autonomy of the source material.

Jacob Dahlgren was born in Stockholm, Sweden in 1970. Dahlgren represented Sweden in the Nordic Pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennale. His work has been exhibited at, KIASMA Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center/MoMA, New York, USA, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden, Turner Contemporary, Margate, UK, and Tramway, Glasgow, UK. He lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden.

The Raven

The New Art Gallery Walsall

4th December 2014 - 26 April 2015

Churton Fairman (1924 - 1997) - better known by his alias Mike Raven - had an extraordinary life. Starting out as an aspiring ballet dancer and photographer, he then became a pirate radio dj, pioneer of blues music and one of the first presenters on Radio One. He was also a horror movie actor, starring alongside the like of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. In the 1970s he gave up his celebrity lifestyle and moved to Bodmin Moor in Cornwall to become a sheep farmer and wood carver. Fairman's sculpture, which explored religious themes, was exhibited alongside work by Henry Moore and Jacob Epstein, and was well received and collected during his lifetime, but since then has been all but forgotten.

Artist Darren Banks, who discovered he had a family connection to Churton Fairman and was intrigued by his life story, has recently created a body of work inspired by Fairman's legacy. Banks' practice examines the relationship between objects and film, so he was drawn to Fairman's work as both a sculptor and horror movie actor.

Our 2nd Floor Garman Ryan temporary exhibition space will host a new installation by Banks, which will reference Fairman, alongside works by Epstein and Gaudier-Brzeska in our collection.

The New Art Gallery Walsall has been gifted one of the Churton Fairman's sculptures, which will go on display for the first time in our Religion room as part of this exhibition.

Drawing on Susie Green's own experience as an artist and musician who also works as a life-model, this event is an alternative to what is often seen as a one-way experience - an audience drawing a model observationally.

Fluid Medium will take the format of an experimental life-drawing class with exercises in drawing, sound and prop design led by Green. With a view to creating a collaborative immersive environment, an openness to (clothed) participation is asked of those who attend. Previous life drawing experience is not required and drawing materials will be provided.

Susie Green uses the stuff of everyday life as malleable material, making sculptural works that criss-cross between art, music and fashion.

A recurring interest is the concept of fetishisation - how Green herself and others might seek to inhabit an object, surface or texture. Mediation and display are explored through focussing upon the point at which the everyday and casual can become formalised and otherworldly, through lighting and display. Often returning to the idea of pathos, and the exchange between artist and audience, Green is interested in that which is human, emotional and tactile. Making work that is often self-referential, about the pleasures or frustrations of looking and the evocative role of materials, Green explores the potential of an artwork to open up a liminal space in a viewer.

SKULPTUR

4 February 2015 - 15 May 2015 Wednesday-Friday, 12:30-5:30pm or by appointment

RBS Galleries, 108 Old Brompton Road, London SW7 3RA

PRIVATE VIEW: 4 February 2015, 3:30-8:30pm

Prince's Gardens, Imperial College London, the Goethe-Institut London and the RBS Galleries in South Kensington, London

Royal British Society of Sculptors (RBS) is delighted to present SKULPTUR, an exhibition of contemporary sculpture from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. Encompassing indoor and outdoor sculpture, video, installation, and performance, it will be the first ever large scale group exhibition focused exclusively on Nordic sculpture in London, and features the work of many artists who have never exhibited in the city before.

Opening on 4 February 2015, the work will be displayed at three sites in South Kensington: the RBS galleries on Old Brompton Road, the Goethe-Institut London, and Prince's Gardens, a public square owned by Imperial College London.

Says RBS Deputy Director and Curator, Claire Mander: "SKULPTUR offers a glimpse of the strength and range of contemporary Nordic three dimensional practice and provides the opportunity to explore its distinctiveness."

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About Me

Workplace Gallery is a contemporary art gallery run by artists.
Based in Gateshead UK, Workplace Gallery represents a portfolio of emerging and established artists through the gallery programme, curatorial projects and international art fairs.